St. Anthony's to close S.F.'s Marian Residence

SAN FRANCISCO

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Photo: Liz Hafalia, SFC

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Annabel Goodrich, left, and Leticia Hernandez talk about their lives at Marian Residence for Women on Tuesday, May 13, 2008, and wonder where they will go when it closes. The facility was established by St. Anthony's Foundation and is widely recognized as one of the city's best shelters for homeless women in San Francisco, Calif. Photo by Liz Hafalia / San Francisco Chronicle less

Annabel Goodrich, left, and Leticia Hernandez talk about their lives at Marian Residence for Women on Tuesday, May 13, 2008, and wonder where they will go when it closes. The facility was established by St. ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, SFC

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Annabel Goodrich, left, Leticia Hernandez, and Sandra Van Dusen talk about their lives at Marian Residence for Women, which is widely recognized as one of the city's best shelters for homeless women in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, May 13, 2008. Photo by Liz Hafalia / San Francisco Chronicle less

Annabel Goodrich, left, Leticia Hernandez, and Sandra Van Dusen talk about their lives at Marian Residence for Women, which is widely recognized as one of the city's best shelters for homeless women in San ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

St. Anthony's to close S.F.'s Marian Residence

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On a November day in 2006, Leticia Hernandez boarded a bus in San Jose looking for help and several hours later found herself at Eighth and Mission streets in San Francisco, looking at a sign for the St. Anthony Foundation's Marian Residence for Women.

"I thought, 'Where there's a saint, there's help.' I knocked on the door, (and) I thought I was walking into the Hilton," she said.

Hernandez, now 46, had been on the streets for several years. The Bay Area native wasn't into drugs and isn't mentally ill - the high school dropout simply had a string of bad luck, reinjuring her back doing odd jobs until she couldn't work anymore and lost her apartment. She ended up at shelters, where she spent petrifying nights trying to ignore threats from drunken men.

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A safe place to stay

Marian Residence, where Hernandez has lived since that day in 2006, gave her a safe place to stay, time to recover from her injuries, and job training. It will close at the end of this summer, however, the victim of budget cuts and rising costs. But unlike other homeless shelters slated for closure - and despite promises by city officials that the beds will be replaced - Marian Residence is unique, focusing its services exclusively at the largely hidden population of homeless women.

Hernandez - nearly 6 feet tall, not including her mop of curly black hair flecked with gray strands - isn't your typical homeless woman. She is well put together and articulate. But she faced the same problems any homeless woman does: There is a dearth of shelters for women, and many beds at coed facilities are unsafe. In general, it is difficult and time-consuming to reserve these beds, and they don't offer long-term arrangements or services.

Residence is two facilities

Marian Residence is really two facilities - an emergency shelter downstairs and a transitional home upstairs. The drug- and alcohol-free center offers meals, case managers, mental health referrals, job training and money management help to its clients. Those in the transitional home have to be working, in school or in mental health treatment.

Hernandez is now working toward completion of a computer-repair program and had hoped to save enough money to get her own place. She and about 57 other women will have to find a new place to stay come Aug. 31.

The home at 1171 Mission St. started as a makeshift shelter in 1983. Workers at St. Anthony Dining Room realized that there was nowhere for homeless women to go and starting putting mats out on the floor at night. More than a decade later, the program moved into its current home and expanded. It now costs about $1.2 million a year to operate.

City officials have said they plan to bring an additional 60 beds online at existing shelters to make up for the loss, but Hernandez and others insist Marian Residence cannot be replaced simply by adding cots elsewhere.

"When you're homeless, you have no time," she said. "Marian gives you time to heal emotionally, and financially, so you never come back to the shelter."

There are no accurate numbers on exactly how many women are on the streets of San Francisco, but advocates agree that they do not have as many options as men, who make up a majority of the homeless population. According to the city's last count in 2007, at least 13.5 percent of the 6,377 homeless people in the city are female. Advocates believe there are far more.

"Really, homelessness is about what you see when you walk down the street," said Paul Boden, director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project. "You don't see women as much, so they're not as much of a priority. But those women are out there."

Many of the women served at Marian Residence are severely mentally ill; some are recovering addicts. Others are victims of domestic violence, some are transgender women, and lately more are elderly and on fixed incomes.

Residents and staff members say each group presents unique challenges they doubt will be met in other homes. Many domestic violence shelters, for example, refuse to take homeless women, and transgender women are often turned away by both men's and women's facilities.

"It's brutal," said Boden, who was once homeless, of Marian's closure. "There's no other way to describe it."

Many programs being cut

The program is just the latest victim in a long line of social programs being cut across the nation because of the worsening economy and the worldwide food shortage.

Francis Aviani, a spokeswoman for the 57-year-old St. Anthony Foundation, said it was a difficult decision for the nonprofit's leaders. By next spring, St. Anthony's also will shutter and sell the Farm, an organic dairy farm in Petaluma that is run by 42 men recovering from drug and alcohol addiction.

St. Anthony's board of directors, faced with more demand, higher food prices and other rising costs, decided in April to shutter Marian Residence and the Farm so the foundation can focus on its core mission - offering basic services such as meals and clothing. "Marian Residence is a very beautiful program," Aviani said, "but it also takes money to run a program of that caliber. We have to brace ourselves for what is around the corner."

Whatever is around the corner, Hernandez believes she will be all right. She is saving her money and plans to complete the training program by August. But she's most worried about those the home would have served.

"If I had money in my pocket, I would pull out a checkbook and give it to them to keep Marian open," she said. "This isn't just about me. It's about a building full of women, and more women to come."

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